Ray Kurzweil

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“Will Virtual Intelligence Ever Be Anything More Than A Figment Of A Real Person?”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Anything we can conjure in our minds, not matter how far-fetched, could happen eventually in reality. Maybe not exactly in the form we hoped or as soon as we wanted, but in some sense. From a Code(Love) piece by Roger Huang about digitally raising the dead, a favorite pursuit of Ray Kurzweil:

“Will virtual intelligence ever be anything more than a figment of a real person? The question examines everything humans have always assumed about human nature: that we are unique, and that we are defined by our uniqueness against non-humans. We possess a strange combination of social interaction, physical manipulation, and processing power that is hard to define, so we often use comparisons to living things that are distinctly not human to define ourselves.

We are not cows. We are not dolphins. We are not chimpanzees, even though that is getting uncomfortably close.

The closer robots get to piercing that space, the more uncomfortable humans get with them. This is the ‘uncanny valley.’ The more robots look, and act like humans, even if we distinctly know they are not, the more we revile them. Like the broken souls of the Ring, poorly designed robots can lead us to hate, and to pain, because they lead us to question who we truly are.

Virtual life that humans can accept must pass the Turing Test. It must fool a human into thinking that it too is a human, that it is really he or she. When Ray sits down to talk with his reincarnated father, he cannot be talking with a robot, but with a real, living human being that he has been yearning to speak to for forty long years.

Ray Kurzweil believes that will happen within a couple of decades.”•

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The 17-year-old Kurzweil in 1965 on I’ve Got a Secret:

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“Men Will Already Have Begun An Orgy Of Machinification”

January 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Moore’s Law won’t apply to anything–even integrated circuits–forever. And it doesn’t apply to many things at all. Growth has its spurts, but other things get in the way: entropy, priorities, politics, etc. So I think the near-term questions regarding machines aren’t about transhumanism and other such lofty ones but rather more practical considerations. You know, like a highly automated society creating new jobs and 3-D printers making the manufacturing of firearms uncontrollable and undetectable. In a Commentary broadside, David Gelernter, that brilliant and perplexing thinker, takes aim at the approach of today’s technologists and what he sees as their lack of commitment to humanism. An excerpt about Ray Kurzweil:

“The voice most strongly associated with what I’ve termed roboticism is that of Ray Kurzweil, a leading technologist and inventor. The Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and ever-increasing pace of technological progress and change, a fateful crossover point is approaching. He calls this point the ‘singularity.’ After the year 2045 (mark your calendars!), machine intelligence will dominate human intelligence to the extent that men will no longer understand machines any more than potato chips understand mathematical topology. Men will already have begun an orgy of machinification—implanting chips in their bodies and brains, and fine-tuning their own and their children’s genetic material. Kurzweil believes in ‘transhumanism,’ the merging of men and machines. He believes human immortality is just around the corner. He works for Google.

Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind. Because if things work out as he predicts, there will still be life on Earth, but no human life. To predict that a man who lives forever and is built mainly of semiconductors is still a man is like predicting that a man with stainless steel skin, a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ of 10,000 would still be a man. In fact we have no idea what he would be.

Each change in him might be defended as an improvement, but man as we know him is the top growth on a tall tree in a large forest: His kinship with his parents and ancestors and mankind at large, the experience of seeing his own reflection in human history and his fellow man—those things are the crucial part of who he is. If you make him grossly different, he is lost, with no reflection anywhere he looks. If you make lots of people grossly different, they are all lost together—cut adrift from their forebears, from human history and human experience. Of course we do know that whatever these creatures are, untransformed men will be unable to keep up with them. Their superhuman intelligence and strength will extinguish mankind as we know it, or reduce men to slaves or dogs. To wish for such a development is to play dice with the universe.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“We Also Have New Tools That Allow Us To Actually Reprogram Our Biology”

December 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ray Kurzweil’s prognostications always seem too optimistic and aggressive to me. It’s not that I don’t think we’ll accomplish most of what he says we will–if we don’t destroy ourselves first, that is–but I think it will take longer, in some cases much longer. The opening of his CNN piece which predicts the short term future of science and technological development:

“By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.

Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s.

We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.

We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.

RNA interference, for example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune system, have the ability to add new genes.

Stem cell therapies, including the recently developed method to create ‘induced pluripotent cells’ (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch.

There are now hundreds of drugs and processes in the pipeline using these methods to modify the course of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and aging processes.

As one of many examples, we can now fix a broken heart — not (yet) from romance — but from a heart attack, by rejuvenating the heart with reprogrammed stem cells.

Health and medicine is now an information technology and is therefore subject to what I call the ‘law of accelerating returns,’ which is a doubling of capability (for the same cost) about each year that applies to any information technology.

As a result, technologies to reprogram the ‘software’ that underlie human biology are already a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome project was completed in 2003, and will again be a thousand times more powerful than they are today in a decade, and a million times more powerful in two decades.”

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“A Robot That Is Designed To Play Chess Might Also Want To Build A Spaceship”

October 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.

Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:

“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.

For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of ‘abundance,’ with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.

Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.

Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, ‘if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,’ in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.”

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“Biology Is A Software Process”

October 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Kate Lunau’s new Maclean’s interview with Ray Kurzweil, partner of Peter Diamandis at Singularity University:

“Question: 

You say we’re in the midst of a ‘grand transformation’ in the field of medicine. What do you see happening today?

Ray Kurzweil: 

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. We each have a fat insulin receptor gene that says, ‘Hold on to every calorie.’ That was a very good idea 10,000 years ago, when you worked all day to get a few calories; there were no refrigerators, so you stored them in your fat cells. I would like to tell my fat insulin receptor gene, ‘You don’t need to do that anymore,’ and indeed that was done at the Joslin Diabetes Center. They turned off this gene, and the [lab mice] ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn’t get diabetes; they didn’t get heart disease. They lived 20 per cent longer. They’re working with a drug company to bring that to market.

Life expectancy was 20 a thousand years ago; 37, 200 years ago. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and that [pace is] going to continue to accelerate. We’re treating biology, and by extension health and medicine, as an information technology. Our intuition about how progress will unfold is linear, but information technology progresses exponentially, not linearly. My Android phone is literally several billion times more powerful, per dollar, than the computer I used when I was a student. And it’s also 100,000 times smaller. We’ll do both of those things again in 25 years. It’ll be a billion times more powerful, and will be the size of a blood cell.”

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“Would We Soon Be Able To Choose To Live Forever?”

October 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Future shock in the present tense, Singularity University in Mountain View, California, is a Moore’s Law-loving educational institution and business incubator that may be expensive folly or the future–or perhaps a little of both. Eric Benson of Buzzfeed graduated from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis’ school, which promises abundant energy, the end of illness and even immortality, and filed a report. The opening:

“It was the final night of classes at Singularity University’s March 2013 Executive Program, and we, the students, had been given a valedictory assignment: Predict the future.

For the past six days, the 63 of us had been immersed in lectures on the nearly limitless potential of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and bioinformatics, and now the moment had arrived for us to figure out what we really believed and ponder the big questions. Was a transhuman future — the Singularity — really only three decades away, as SU’s chancellor and co-founder Ray Kurzweil had prophesied? Were we really on the brink of a cure for all viruses and an era of radical energy abundance? Would we soon be able to choose to live forever? How many glasses of wine would it take until our group of entrepreneurs, executives, and hippie mystics got impatient and just resolved to build a time machine?

Inside Singularity University’s airy classroom on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the SU staff distributed about 50 sheets of paper, many bearing newspaper headlines from this radical but not-too-distant future. (A future that, shockingly, still included a print newspaper industry.) We were instructed to break up into small groups to decide when in the next 20 years these world-changing milestones would come to pass.

‘LIFE EXPECTANCY REACHES 150 IN AMERICA’ blared the first headline. I stared at it incredulously. Life expectancy in the United States was currently 79. For the life expectancy to hit 150, that would mean… I started to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations. One of my fellow classmates, the 66-year-old chairman of an international law firm, was quicker to formulate his answer. ‘According to a gerontologist in England, the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born,’ he told us. ‘I’m not sure I believe that, but everyone thinks that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. I’d even say the first person to live to 200 has been born.’ The other five of us nodded our heads. We collectively decided that U.S. life expectancy would reach 150 within the next 10 to 15 years.”

 

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“No Human Effort Will Be Necessary”

August 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Ray Kurzweil writing that spurred Bill Joy to pen his famous 2000 Wired article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he worried about a utopia that seemed to him dystopic:

“THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’ Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

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“[They] Can Hope To Experience Practical Immortality If They Hang On For Another 15 Years”

April 15, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.’s new Wall Street Journal interview with the ever-fascinating Ray Kurzweil:

“Mr. Kurzweil’s frank efforts to outwit death have earned him an exaggerated reputation for solemnity, even caused some to portray him as a humorless obsessive. This is wrong. Like the best comedians, especially the best Jewish comedians, he doesn’t tell you when to laugh. Of the pushback he receives from certain theologians who insist death is necessary and ennobling, he snarks, ‘Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.’

‘People say, ‘Oh, only the rich are going to have these technologies you speak of.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, like cellphones.’

To listen to Mr. Kurzweil or read his several books (the latest: How to Create a Mind) is to be flummoxed by a series of forecasts that hardly seem realizable in the next 40 years. But this is merely a flaw in my brain, he assures me. Humans are wired to expect ‘linear’ change from their world. They have a hard time grasping the ‘accelerating, exponential’ change that is the nature of information technology.

‘A kid in Africa with a smartphone is walking around with a trillion dollars of computation circa 1970,’ he says. Project that rate forward, and everything will change dramatically in the next few decades.

‘I’m right on the cusp,’ he adds. ‘I think some of us will make it through’—he means baby boomers, who can hope to experience practical immortality if they hang on for another 15 years.”

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“Lots Of People Will Opt Out At First”

March 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think more than most that people will be surprisingly accepting of nanotechnology as medicine in the same way they’ve been open, even inviting, of nonstop surveillance. Father-and-son futurists Ray and Ethan Kurzweil don’t necessarily agree with that view in a new Wall Street Journal interview conducted by Amir Efrati. An excerpt:

“WSJ: 

What will happen technologically in the next five years?

Ray Kurzweil: 

My message is the law of accelerating returns and how remarkably predictable the exponential growth of IT is. More and more things become IT, like health and medicine. There will be 3-D printing, augmented reality.

Ethan Kurzweil: 

Every step along the way will freak people out.

Ray Kurzweil:

With nanodevices that will be implanted in our bodies to repair us, putting technology in our bloodstream, lots of people will opt out at first.”

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“Will We Have Tiny Computers In Our Bloodstream, Ever Alert For Something Amiss?”

February 21, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Dan Tapscott’s Globe and Mail piece about the latest book from Ray Kurzweil, that lightning rod, about the current and future merger of human and machine: 

“The thesis of How to Create a Mind is that the human brain itself is the most powerful thinking machine available today, so it is logical that we look to the brain for guidance on how to make devices smarter. He outlines a theory he calls ‘the pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM),’ which he says ‘describes the basic algorithm of the neocortex (the region of the brain responsible for perception, memory and critical thinking).’ By reverse-engineering the human brain, we will be able to ‘to vastly extend the power of our own intelligence.’

What will we do with this new intelligence? First, we will better understand the brain itself and develop superior treatments for the brain’s ailments, such as psychiatric disorders. Second, we will use our expanded intelligence to solve the many problems that confront mankind. Finally, we will use the intelligence to teach us how to be smarter.

I have written often about today’s smartphones evolving into digital co-pilots, our constant companions that will help us get through the day. Kurzweil sees such devices shrinking to microscopic size and residing within our bodies. Will we have tiny computers in our bloodstream, ever alert for something amiss? These devices will be our links to what is now called the cloud, the vast computing power of the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples and the IBMs of the world.”

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“We’re Really On A Remarkable Trajectory Of Quickening Innovation”

December 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

It was surprising to hear that Ray Kurzweil has accepted the position of Director of Engineering at Google. He seems at the point in his career where he’d want to be independent not an employee, but I suppose there are lots of things you can do with Google’s resources that you can’t accomplish on your own. From Neal Ungerleider at Fast Company:

“Ray Kurzweil is best known these days as the world’s foremost Singularity evangelist and as a prophet of a whizbang, techno-utopian future. However, Kurzweil first came to tech fame as a machine-learning guru whose groundbreaking work on voice recognition and optical character recognition changed computing and laid the groundwork for everything from Siri to desktop scanners.

Now, Kurzweil has a new home: Google. On Friday, Google announced that Kurzweil is their newest Director of Engineering. Kurzweil started at Google today with a focus on new machine-learning and language-processing projects.

‘In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic,’ Kurzweil said in a statement. ‘Fast forward a decade–Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.'”

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The Kurzweil Reading Machine, 1977:

The future futurist plays his computer composition on TV, 1965:

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“Chemical Brain Preservation Is A Technology That May Soon Be Validated”

November 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In order to recreate biologically dead human beings, you need their memories, not just skin and hair and eyes. A quartet of predictions about the future from John Smart‘s long-form post at Kurzweil AI about brain preservation::

“1. As I argue in this video, chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.

2. If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.

3. If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being ‘uploaded’ into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.

4. In all societies where a significant minority (let’s say 100,000 people) have done brain preservation at biological death, significant positive social change will result in those societies today, regardless of how much information is eventually recovered from preserved brains.”

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“I Think We’ll Be In Augmented Reality All The Time”

November 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Via Computerworld, a passage on Ray Kurzweil holding forth at the DEMO conference last week: “You can learn new material at any age, but there is a limited capacity. That’s one of the things we will overcome by basically expanding the brain into the cloud,’ he said. ‘We need to be able to repurpose our neocortex to learn something new. People who have a rigid process and hold onto old information; they will have a hard time doing that. You need to be able to move on.’

While Kurzweil did not give a timetable for these predictions, he said the notion of ‘brain extenders’ has already begun thanks to technology including IBM’s Watson supercomputer and augmented reality. ‘I think we’ll be in augmented reality all the time,’ Kurzweil said.”

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“Would You Choose Chemical Brain Preservation At Death If It Was Widely Available?”

September 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At his blog, futurist Ray Kurzweil asks questions about “the hypothesis that chemical brain preservation may inexpensively preserve the organism’s memories and mental states after death.” An excerpt:

“Would you choose chemical brain preservation at death if it was widely available, validated, and inexpensive? If not, why not? Would you do it to donate your brain to science? Your memories to your children or others who might want them? Would you be willing to come back in person, if that turns out to be possible? If it is sufficiently inexpensive, would it be best to preserve your brain at death, and let future society decide if either your memories or your identity are ‘worth’ reanimating?”

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“We Are Living Through The Most Exciting Period Of Human History”

August 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have great respect for the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, though I usually think his predictions are very aggressive. In his defense, he is way smarter than I am. From the Sun:

“WE are living through the most exciting period of human history.

Computer technology and our understanding of genes — our body’s software programs — are accelerating at an incredible rate.

I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nano-technology will let us live for ever.

Already, blood cell-sized submarines called nanobots are being tested in animals. These will soon be used to destroy tumours, unblock clots and perform operations without scars.

Ultimately, nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.

Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen.”

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“All Of The Water Will Then Be Drained From His Brain And Spinal Cord, Replaced By Pure Plastic Resin”

July 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece from Evan R. Goldstein’s Chronicle article about “offshoring” human brains into robot receptacles, effectively immortalizing not only human intelligence but individual personalities as well. It’s a process far beyond cryonics. Ray Kurzweil illuminates the topic further in his blog post “The Strange Neuroscience Of Immortality.” An excerpt about neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth:

“Before becoming ‘very sick or very old,’ he’ll opt for an ‘early ‘retirement’ to the future,’ he writes. There will be a send-off party with friends and family, followed by a trip to the hospital. After Hayworth is placed under anesthesia, a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through his still-functioning vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in his brain into place, preventing decay, and killing him instantly.

Then he will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make his cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin.

Every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, ‘the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.’

Using a ultramicrotome (like one developed by Hayworth, with a grant by the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience), his plastic-embedded preserved brain will eventually be cut into strips, and then imaged in an electron microscope. The physical brain will be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of his connectome.

In 100 years or so, Hayworth says, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a computer simulation of the mind. And because the plastination process will have preserved his spinal nerves, the computer-generated mind can be connected to a robot body.”

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Howard Stern investigates cryonics and the fate of Ted Williams’ frozen head:

Fuh-fuh-frozen.

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“The Evacuated Tube Transport Would Take Passengers From New York To Beijing In Just Two Hours”

March 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I love Ray Kurzweil, but let’s say that he is a glass-half-full kind of futurist. Naturally, he’s drawn to the promise of Evacuated Tube Transport Technolgy (ET3), car-sized passenger capsules that travel via tubes. Space travel here on Earth! Someday, perhaps. From Kurzweil:

“The Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system (U.S. Patent 5950543, assigned to ET3.com, Inc.) would take passengers from New York to Beijing in just two hours. Advocates of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) claim it is silent, cheaper than planes, trains, or cars and faster than jets.

How it would work: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. Passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows.”

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ET3 promotional video:

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“Kurzweil Doesn’t Think That The Future Will Arrive In A Rush”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a Cory Doctorow-Ray Kurzweil discussion about the Singularity in Asimov’s in 1995;

“‘Progress is exponential–not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk–the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.’

But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.'” (Thanks Longform.)

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Kurzweil sits for an interview with that dashing cyborg Charlie Rose, 2007:

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Chinese Aquatic Microbot Walks On Water

July 31, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Kurzweil reports on a new spying device from China:

“A new aquatic microrobot that mimics the water-walking abilities of the water strider has been developed by researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.

The robot is about the size of a quarter, with ten water-repellent, wire legs and two movable, oar-like legs propelled by two miniature motors. Because the weight of the microrobot is equal to that of about 390 water striders, one might expect that it would sink quickly when placed on the water surface. But it stands effortlessly on water surfaces and also walks and turns freely.

It imitates water striders, mosquitoes, and water spiders, who are able to walk on water due largely to their highly water-repellent (superhydrophobic) legs.”

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“It Took Only 48 Hours To Print”

July 29, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As noted on Ray Kurzweil’s site, a small but fiunctional aircraft was created for the first time using a 3-D printer:

“Engineers at the University of Southampton have designed and flown the world’s first ‘printed’ aircraft, which could revolutionize the economics of aircraft design, the engineers say.

The SULSA (Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft) plane is an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), with its entire structure printed. This includes wings, integral control surfaces, and access hatches. It was printed on an EOS EOSINT P730 nylon laser sintering machine, which fabricates plastic or metal objects, building up the item layer-by-layer.

It took only 48 hours to print. No fasteners were used and all equipment was attached using ‘snap fit’techniques so the entire airframe could be put together without tools in about 30 seconds, according to Prof. Andy Keane. The aircraft took around 8 person weeks. It passed tests for speed, maneuverability, and climb rates.”

••••••••••

Getting airborne:

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“I Don’t Hold With Those Pessimists Who Claim That We Can Never Understand Our Minds By Using Our Brains”

July 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

On Boing Boing, neurobiologist David J. Linden pushes back on futurist Ray Kurzweil’s vision of nanobots being introduced into our brains in the near term, making it possible for us to communicate with external hardware and extend our memory and intellect almost infinitely. An excerpt:

“Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that the fundamental and long-standing mysteries of the brain will ultimately be solved. I don’t hold with those pessimists who claim that we can never understand our minds by using our brains. I also share Kurzweil’s belief that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function. But while I see an exponential trajectory in the amount of neurobiological data collected to date, the ploddingly linear increase in our understanding of neural function means that an idea like mind-uploading to machines being usefully deployed by the 2020s or even the 2030s seems overly optimistic.” (Thanks Browser.)

Kurzweil’s take:

“Still not within the nervous system, you got 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside. We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, there would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet and they also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system.

So, for on to go in the virtual reality environment, the nanobots will shut down the signals coming from I realize in my real skin and create the signals that will be appropriate for the virtual environment and that will feel like I’m in that environment and I’ll have a virtual body and those environment could be the same body I have in real reality, it could be a different body, a couple could become each other, experience relationship from the others perspective, teacher could design a student to become Ben Franklin in the virtual constitutional congress not just dress up as him but become that character and this virtual environments would be like websites, you’ll have millions to choose from and some will be recreations are beautiful earthly environments like the Taj Mahal or the Mediterranean Beach.”

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Futurist Ray Kurzweil Predicts What’s Next

April 26, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Whether he’s a prophet or crackpot (or both), Queens-born futurist Ray Kurzweil is having a moment. Sheerly Avni posted a video at Open Culture of Kurzweil taking questions from Time magazine editor Stephen Koepp.

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Ray Kurzweil At The iLabs Singularity Summit

April 4, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Which was held in Italy. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)

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“What We Need Is A New Frontier, An Open Space For Political Experiments…And The Next Frontier Is The Ocean”

February 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A seasteading design by Andras Gyorfi.

Seasteading sounds ridiculous to me, but what do I know? Ray Kurzweil’s blog has a transcript of “How to Create a Startup Country,” a speech on building nations on the ocean, presented by Patri Friedman:

“A startup country could be the world’s first trillion dollar business.

Now for humanity, this is a huge problem, but with our entrepreneur hats on, what a business opportunity! A startup country could be the world’s first trillion dollar business. But right now, there’s no way for an entrepreneur with a great idea for a startup country to make it happen. Unlike the software industry, where you can get started with just a laptop, to enter the government industry, you need a open space, a physical place that allows political experiments. But there is no such place — every piece of land in the world is claimed.

So there are no startup countries, there’s no channel for innovation of entrepreneurs … no wonder it’s a such a sad industry.

So why don’t we see more innovation in politics? Now, politics is a pretty emotionally charged subject. You’re not supposed to talk about that, or religion. So let’s take a new perspective. Let’s forget about left and right and instead, put on our entrepreneur hats. Let’s think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and citizens are customers.

This is not just any industry. This is the world’s biggest industry. The leading firm had 2009 revenues of 2.5 trillion dollars. Strangely, it’s also an industry legendary for poor performance. That leading firm lost 1.4 trillion. And that’s a top company. The worst companies kill many of their own customers. It’s a pretty sad industry!

The seasteading solution: let a thousand nations bloom

So that’s how we come to seasteading — homesteading the high seas. What we need is a new frontier, an open space for political experiments…and the next frontier is the ocean. With a little technical innovation to make this new frontier accessible, we can unleash enormous political innovation. Let a thousand nations bloom on the high seas, trying diverse political systems — essentially, a startup sector for government.”

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“The Computer Wrote The Music I Just Played”

February 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Singularity enthusiast Ray Kurzweil is profiled by Lev Grossman in a Time piece entitled, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.” In the article, the futurist predicts that the singularity–that moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence–will occur in 2045, which seems very ambitious. Grossman recalls that in 1965 a teenage Kurzweil appeared on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret to perform a piano piece composed by a computer he built.

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